BlazeDS: Open Sourcing Remoting and Messaging

Today is yet another exciting day for the Flex community and for the world of Rich Internet applications… Adobe is announcing plans to release its Remoting and Messaging technologies under a new open source product named BlazeDS.

The news is probably all over the blogs, but I thought I would summarize the key points:

• The Remoting and Messaging technology previously available only as part of LiveCycle Data Services will now be available for free as a new Open Source product called BlazeDS (under LGPL v3 license).
• The public beta of BlazeDS is available for download here (the GA version is scheduled for early 2008).
• As part of this announcement, the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification is also being published. The spec is available here.
• The JIRA bugbase is available here.

Additional Information:

• BlazeDS includes a new HTTP Streaming channel for real time applications that require very low latency. The sample applications packaged with BlazeDS provide examples of real time market data streaming and collaborative applications built with BlazeDS and using the new HTTP Streaming channel (the RTMP protocol is not included in BlazeDS).
• In addition to the BlazeDS war file, the BlazeDS download includes a version of Tomcat (6.0.14) with a series of web applications fully configured with BlazeDS (including blazeds-sample).

Getting Started:

1. Download the BlazeDS beta 1 zip file here
2. Expand it on your local file system (for example in a /blazeds directory)
3. Start Tomcat (startup.bat or startup.sh in /blazeds/tomcat/bin)
4. Open a browser and access the samples home page: http://localhost:8400/blazeds-samples/
5. Take the test drive!

Background Information on Messaging:

The Message Service provides a complete publish/subscribe infrastructure allowing Flex clients and the server to exchange messages in real time. The Message Service is made of two key components: a message service running in the application server, and a client-side API. The message service manages a set of destinations. The client-side API allows Flex clients to publish and subscribe to these destinations.

The Message Service enables data push, and collaborative applications to be delivered in the browser in a reliable and scalable manner while preserving the benefits of the traditional web deployment model.

The Message Service can integrate with existing messaging systems through an adapter architecture. A JMS adapter is available out-of-the-box. Using the JMS adapter, you can map BlazeDS messaging destinations to JMS topics, allowing Flex clients to publish and subscribe to JMS topics.

Background Information on Remoting:

Remoting allows a Flex applications to directly invoke methods of Java objects deployed in your application server. The benefits of Remoting include performance and the straightforward programming model.

Additional Offerings:

• Adobe will also offer “Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, Community Edition”, a subscription offering that includes certified builds of BlazeDS, enterprise support, etc.
• LiveCycle Data Services ES (the commercial product) will continue to exist and will focus on higher level APIs: such as Data Management Services, Portal Integration, Offline Synchronization, etc.